It's a phenomenon in programms that are regardet as beeing really hard or hard to get into, i think. People think of themselfes as better and more intelligent than everyone else.

I am in a really small, very specialized programm in the engineering field. We have a kind of 'sister program' that is a big bigger and is specialized in a related area. For some reason, the guys in the other programm think they are so much better than us and oh so very much more intelligent, even though the difficulty is almost the same, if not a bit harder for us. It has gotten to the point where they won't even take help from any of the people in my programm if offered